Something strange in the neighborhood

Wut happened? Universities are such nice quiet places all summer, and then bam!  Something happens! It's noisy, it's crowded, it's a longer line at the coffee shop, it's hard to find parking (if you drive to campus).  Oh, yes, the students have returned for the fall semester, an event TPP avoided last year by taking a  sabbatical in Tuscany from life as usual. It hasn't changed. Students can be seen wandering around looking lost. iZombies wander the sidewalks. TPP is still concerned about the preparedness of today's students, what has been called the infantization of college students, the idea that students should be protected from discomforting and disturbing ideas or concepts. Nothing whatever should challenge their carefully crafted parochial world views. It never dawns on people that this severely limits learning.  Memos from deans suggest how to include "trigger warnings" in your syllabus as a precaution. Yes, probably a good thing TPP has retired with his record to having been accused of being a sexist, a racist, and a religious proselytizer all in the same semester while teaching botany. Some records you just have to be proud of and TPP wasn't even trying to slay any sacred cows or even advocate any cultural changes. It was however a non-majors class, and that semester prompted the move to change the class to an upper division majors class.  The thing about this is that some of these new students will not just do fine, they will do great, prosper, and take advantage of all the neat things you can do at university, like research, but it's impossible to tell ahead which ones. Finding those who wanted to learn was one of the great things about being a university professor. So from the sidelines, TPP wishes his colleagues and all the new students well. The formula for success is pretty easy: go to class, take time to think, and make an honest effort. As for the students, well, the same advice applies to you too.

Biological research funding

This AM on public radio there was a story about the lack of research grant money and what a difficult time biomedical researchers had keeping their research labs going. Now here's the thing, these are biomedical researchers, and they've always had access to more research money than any other part of biology to the point that we like to say the human bio-medical tail wags the biology dog. The hunt for grant money shapes many hiring decisions at research universities.  TPP takes no pleasure in hearing about researchers' grant money woes, but try getting botanical research funded that doesn't include wheat, maize, or soybean in the title. So easy street is drying up for biomedical type research, but it's always been like pulling teeth to get grant money for botanical research. And actually in terms of bang for your buck, giving us small science guys money would result in more students doing more research than when you give it to big money research. For $50,000 TPP could do research for 5 years using most of the money to keep students fed. That much money wouldn't keep the doors of a big biomedical research lab open for 3 months. And small money grants are even harder to find and to get than big money grants. The competition for grants now creates a boom or bust cycle, and generally that's not an efficient use of resources at all. Presently the USA is selling its biological research down the river because it doesn't want to invest in the future. This is part of the anti-science, anti-education attitude that has permeated our government and such politicians don't mind throwing the baby out with the bath water to get rid of the parts of science they don't like. Unless research at universities is protected, science will begin to erode, and already it's obvious that whatever leadership the USA had in its public education system is slipping away. Like many other things, the lack of biomedical research funding is symptomatic of an even bigger problem of continually decreased funding for higher education as a whole. You see, the only way to really teach science is to do science, and that takes time and money.  Fortunately, my research has been cheap and TPP has been able to absorb personally the costs of his research up to a point; students have got to eat, at least a little.